Stop burning the Lower Buffalo Wilderness

Some burning history. Feb 8. 2013 | Comments (0)

Lower Buffalo Wilderness Prescribed Burn 2003

Recently, (Fall 2003) the National Park Service graciously spend a Sunday giving a group of Ozark Society members, including President Alice Andrews, a tour of the Lower Buffalo Wilderness prescribe burn research area and details of plans to expand the project to return the ecosystems to some ancient condition. We met the NPS folks, Sam Lail, David Mott, Tony Collins, Jim Mattingly, Angela Smith, and Rob Klein, at a horse trailhead below Hathaway Mountain.  After introductions and background discussion, we hiked into the wilderness along the well-worn horse trail.  Their job was to convince us that prescribed burns for the 12 thousand-acre wilderness was a good idea.  We stopped at a cedar glade that had been burnt and were shown the grasses that now grow.  On farther into the wilderness, we came to an oak savanna restoration in progress.  After 3 burns in the last 10 years, it needed more burns to achieve the desired condition.  The fires were not hot enough, frequent enough or during the right conditions.  We saw no overwhelming evidence of fuel buildup or endangered species that needed restored.

Comments from the OS group included: Limit the burn to the 500 acres already burnt because the investment that the NPS has made in the project.  Others felt like the NPS could have been more informative about plans for burns in earlier management plans.  Others and I commented that the wilderness areas are so small and are just trying to recover from years of man’s manipulation that they “should just be left alone”.

I have read much about fire history in the last month from white man accounts, tree ring data, Native American accounts, lightning started fires, to history on open woods, prairies, savannas, regional fires, buffalo and elk.  I concluded that here have been lots of research dollars spent on determining how “man” has devastated the wilderness in modern times.

The question may not be “Should we restore it?” but “Can we restore it?”.  There may be too many parts missing.

While the NPS had much higher level of education and training in the fields of botany, ecosystems, fire history, animal habitat, I think they are overlooking recent history and are missing the big picture. The NPS is trying to restore just a very small portion of the Ozark landscape without any plans to change the surrounding lands including other public lands.  I know land managers do not want to talk about “Man and the Biosphere (MAB)” and the Ozark/Ouachita Highlands Assessment project that has died on the vine.  Although they told me there is no mandate from Washington, I think they have the money to spend and it is easier to hide these projects in wilderness.

My conclusion is that without restoring buffalo and elk populations (along with bear, mountain lion and wolf), stopping adjacent property owners from clearing land, and implementing heavy vegetation manipulation (timber removal, herbicide use, annual fires and replanting, the 12 thousand acres of the Lower Buffalo Wilderness will never be returned to the condition it was 400 years ago.  So why are we spending all the time and money on it? 

Kirk Wasson